The Manchester Madonna is coming home. The painting, more formally known as The Virgin and Child with Saint John and Angels, is leaving the National Gallery to star in a new exhibition opening in Manchester tomorrow.

The show at Manchester Art Gallery celebrates the 150th anniversary of a huge display of art treasures staged in 1857 to show that the world's first industrial city was not devoid of culture.

The Virgin and Child caused a sensation because it had only recently been attributed to Michelangelo. Crowds flocked to see it - and 16,000 other paintings, sculptures, watercolours, photographs, ceramics, glassware and textiles - gathered in a vast crystal palace at Old Trafford. The site, clear of the smoke of the city's mills, was the home of Manchester Cricket Club, which graciously agreed to surrender its lease for two years.

The new show brings back to the city 160 works - a hundredth of the original total. More than 1.3 millon visitors came to the 1857 exhibition in just five months, an attendance figure that probably only Tate Modern could match today. Queen Victoria, Dickens, Tennyson, Florence Nightingale and the French emperor Louis Napoleon all headed north to wonder. Philanthropic industrialists (including Titus Salt from Saltaire, near Bradford) hired special trains to bring their workers to see the work of new and old masters, plus major British artists including Hogarth, Gainsborough, Turner, Constable and the then daringly new Pre-Raphaelites - to whom Manchester took quite a fancy.

The exhibition was described modestly as "the greatest show on earth" and according to Victoria Whitfield's catalogue essay, "remains the largest temporary exhibition ever to have been held in Britain. When it closed, the Times remarked that it had 'excited the envy of Londoners and the amazement of foreigners' and that it had 'quite rivalled the attractions of the capital'."

There were a few sniffy comments from art world commentators (what's new?) who, according to Ms Whitfield, "suggested that the exhibition might have done better had it been staged in London. The influential Art-Journal remarked upon Manchester's 'total unfitness' for such an exhibition and suggested that only in the capital could it be 'both understood and made intelligible'.

"Undoubtedly, had the exhibition been staged in London rather than Manchester," Ms Whitfield continues," it would have been a very different affair and arguably not nearly so groundbreaking."

Snobbishness was not confined to London. When one duke (possibly of Devonshire, owner of Chatsworth) was asked to lend works, he replied: "What on earth do you want with art in Manchester? Why can't you stick to cotton-spinning?"

The Queen was more obliging, lending 94 works from the royal collection; the Duke of Portland lent 60 and the Marquess of Hertford had no qualms about sending works by van Dyck, Poussin, Velasquez, Watteau and Rembrandt.

But one of the biggest hits of the show seems to have been Henry Wallis's portrait of Chatterton, seen at the Royal Academy in London in 1856. A letter writer to the Manchester Guardian suggested that the working classes had been greatly taken with the image of the death of the young poet because it "tended to overawe and exalt the mind".

Throughout the exhibition, an orchestra serenaded visitors. Its players, gathered by Charles Hallé, were the nucleus of the Hallé orchestra, also celebrating its 150th birthday this year.

· Art Treasures In Manchester: 150 Years On is at Manchester Art Gallery until January 28